In February, Anthem topped the sales charts in the USA. It has now been revealed that the action RPG achieved the second-best launch ever for BioWare.
Here are the sales figures for Anthem in the USA: According to the American market research firm The NPD Group, Anthem had a strong start:
- In February, the action RPG was the best-selling game in the USA
- and it brought BioWare the second-best launch month in the company’s history
The best launch remains Mass Effect 3, which was released in 2012.
However, Anthem is at a disadvantage here, as the market research firm does not count users who access the game through an EA Access Premier subscription. The game is already included in the subscription for the premium service on PC.
The digital sales on PC are also excluded from the statistics.
What do the numbers indicate? In the USA, Anthem was the best-selling game in February 2019, according to the NPD Group. The market researchers track physical sales at retailers and obtain data from digital sales of the publishers (except for PC).
According to a representative of the market research group, Anthem was the best-selling game of February 2019 and is currently in second place among the best-selling games of the year 2019.
The most sold game of the young year 2019 so far is Kingdom Hearts 3, which was released on January 25, 2019.
Why did previous numbers look bad? The last known numbers only evaluated the “retail sales” in the UK. Here, Anthem was compared to titles from 2017 such as Destiny 2 or Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Retail sales have significantly declined in recent years, since 2017. Anthem seems to be performing much better digitally than in retail.
How is Anthem rated? Despite the sales success, opinions about the game are mixed. Shortly after the launch, the press gave a Metascore of 61 on Metacritic.
Readers on MeinMMO were more lenient in early March, giving the game 7 out of 10 points.
Most recently, the General Manager of BioWare stated that he was disappointed with the launch of Anthem:
